Dice4Hire said:
Yeah, if they want to impress me, they need to have the whole magazine appear on a certain day of the month very month from now till May. If every magazine was decent or above it would impress me a lot. But piecemeal over the course of a month is what we have been getting free fr years on WOTC anyway.
If they just change their Mind's Eye and such piecemeal articles to other names seen in Dragon, it is not impressive at all.
I have no problem with a piecemeal magazine whatsoever - if you want one chock of goodness, wait for the PDF compilation.
However, as I stated above, the pace worries me - I don't want to have a Dragon light with only half the pages. And I miss the ads, because they were sometimes interesting.
My biggest criticism by far, however, is the poor start. I mean, they've known that for month. And not all articles are 4E-articles, like the Death Knight. The Graz'zt article is pretty much a Demonomicon article in Paizo-style. The Dungeon articles are not 4E-style as well. And other stuff... I guess not. They could have prepared some of these articles months in advance! It's not like they're only knowing that they're doing Dragon and Dungeion for one or two month - and Paizo was able to churn out magazines monthly, including print (well, WotC was able to do that as well in the pre-Paizo time). And don't forget, their CCG department (Magic: the Gathering) produces one column a day, has a daily "stuff"-column that shows off artwork, wallpapers and stuff... well, why can't they borrow some web-monkeys from the other WotC-half?
And why is this "R&D: Core Mechanic"-article suddenly a Dragon article? Previously, they were only normal articles.
To sum up, I think the start could have been a bit smoother. I mean they know how to pull something like that off. The 4E announcement was quite spectacular, with life-size beholder and troll at GenCon, videos, blogs, and everything else. They produce books on almost monthly base, that are also filled with stuff. And they had more than enough time to prepare some stuff in advance. Because of all these factors, it looks very... half-hearted.
I still give them the benefit of doubt and hope they get a lot better.
Cheers, LT.